Sunday, 16 January 2011

Redeemer Report (January 2011)

In January 2011’s Redeemer Report, Tim Keller reflects on the significance of lay ministry by taking his cue from Jeremiah 26, and the intervention of the ‘elders of the land’ (26:17) when Jeremiah is threatened with death. As Keller points out, they argue the case from the prophet Micah, demonstrating ‘the importance of having respected laymen who had made their own study of the Scriptures’. Keller goes on to write about the necessity for churches to produce not mere converts but disciples of Christ.

On a related note, the same issue refers to a forthcoming series of ‘gospel and culture lectures’, focusing especially on work, expressing the hope that ‘the church will be awakened to the critical role of work in God’s redemptive plan for all of creation and broaden our understanding of the gospel beyond the walls of the church’.

They cite Dorothy Sayers’ words, first written in the mid-1900s:

‘In nothing has the Church so lost her hold on reality as in her failure to understand and respect the secular vocation. She has allowed work and religion to become separate departments, and is astonished to find that, as a result, the secular work of the world is turned to purely selfish and destructive ends, and that the greater part of the world’s intelligent workers have become irreligious, or at least, uninterested in religion.’